The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and do not necessarily constitute prior art.
A PTZ camera has a combined structure of a pan/tilt drive for the up, down, left, right rotational movement and a camera equipped with fully automatic zoom lenses, and it is capable of providing externally controlled camera rotation and zoom in/out operation of the lens. Therefore, compared with common fixed cameras, PTZ cameras are expensive, but enable the operator to monitor the broader area around via controlled camera rotation, and provide the operator with a remote/near distance monitoring capability and a magnified view of the object of interest via the zoom lens control.
It is typical to adjust the area to be imaged by the PTZ camera by the user, who watches the monitor screen outputting the image captured by the camera, operating a controller apparatus such as a controller with a joystick or a remote controller with arrow keys.
A PTZ camera system may use an On Screen Display menu (OSD menu) to process image settings such as focus, white balance, automatic exposure mode (AE mode).
When setting the captured image with the PTZ camera system, the joystick or the arrow keys of the controller apparatus are used for the PTZ camera movement (pan/tilt/zoom) control or the OSD menu setting. Once entering the OSD menu and then the menu setting operation, the user needs to exit an OSD mode that provides the OSD menu first before the user can adjust the image capturing area by the PTZ camera.
In such an arrangement, the more submenu items provided in an OSD menu item, the more menu selection steps need to be taken to complete setting of a single captured image. To finish setting of one captured image and perform the repeat setting operation on other captured images suffers from the cumbersome routine of turning off the OSD mode and adjusting the OSD menu back from the main menu for the other captured images. Increasing the divisions of the area to be captured with the PTZ camera will aggravate the difficult task of OSD menu setting for each captured image. For example, in order to set a focus mode of a first imaged area to ‘auto’ and set the focus mode of a second imaged area to ‘manual’, the following complicated process has to be undertaken:
1) Move the PTZ camera to the first imaged area by using the controller apparatus→
2) Call OSD menu→
3) Select Focus/Zoom→
4) Enter Focus mode→
5) Select Auto→
6) Disable OSD menu→
7) Move the PTZ camera to the second imaged area by using the controller apparatus→
8) Call OSD menu→
9) Select Focus/Zoom→
10) Enter Focus mode, and then
11) Select ‘Manual’.
When setting the capturing modes of a plurality of image capturing areas, it is necessary to repeat the operations of entering and exiting the OSD mode sequentially for respective image capturing areas to select the OSD menu items, which is cumbersome.